The publishing process typically requires several steps to successfully complete a printed publication. Such steps include planning and organizing, design and content development, and prepress tasks where electronic files are prepared to be reproduced with ink on paper. Broadly speaking, prepress involves the preparation of all the electronic files that will be utilized to create a publication printed with paper and ink. For a professional publication, this usually involves utilizing an authoring program to create the electronic version of the publication itself, and then using another program (which may be a component of the authoring program), to translate this electronic version into a format from which paper and ink copies of the publication can be printed.
Portions if not all of the prepress process is difficult for non-professionals to accomplish, however. While tools such as Adobe PageMaker and Quark Express enable professionals to more easily create professional-looking documents, most non-professionals find these computer programs overly complex and difficult to use. That is, although the computers sitting on the desks of such non-professionals are sufficiently powerful to handle such tasks, the users themselves may not be sufficiently knowledgeable to perform them. Furthermore, even for experienced professionals, the prepress process is fraught with uncertainty; for example, the professional must know the type of paper and ink output that is desired a priori before translating an electronic version of a document into a format from which paper and ink copies can be printed. That is, even for experienced professionals, the prepress process is not tightly integrated enough to attain fast, easy and cost-effective print publishing.